A Spring In Our Step
As we stepped into Spring at the start of February, it felt like there was a change in the air.
A change in the brightness of the day, with the evenings getting a little bit longer, and even a change in the growth around us, with the little peaks of
daffodils slowing emerging up from their sleepy roots.
It is a welcome change, and we are looking forward to much more that the Spring season brings to us.
Our children have loved being together again; learning about Spring, insects, colours and their favourite thing to play with – dinosaurs! We had enjoyed learning from each other too, and just all have fun together. We are still missing all of our friends who have yet to return back to crèche yet with us, but we
look forward to when that will be again. Hopefully very soon.
In the meantime, we hope our children at home have been enjoying the videos we have posted on our Social Media Channels. And we hope they are enjoying some of our curriculum learning at home too.
Feel free to share any activities you have been enjoying at home with us.
In this monthly newsletter, we have shared some insight into the activities from each of our rooms.
Just a additional note to say that our Baby Rooms are nearing capacity in all of our crèches for 2021 so we would like to advise any parents that might be expecting and if you require
any sibling places, please enroll as soon as possible. Application forms are available from us or you can also contact Kim from our Admissions Team on kim.jones@linkschildcare.ie.
Stay Safe.
SONJA QUINN – C R È C H E M A N A G E R
Activities from our Baby Room
Our babies loved to explore with flowers and different types of messy play. They enjoyed water bubbles and giving their animals a bath. The different textures of rice and coconut gave them new sensations to explore. They especially enjoyed the coconut!
We found twigs and leaves in the garden and felt the different textures and grooves. They also made handprint flowers with paint. It is a lovely keepsake to see their little handprints at this age.
In our Baby Room, we are really enjoying story time with our new puppet books. Our babies enjoy the textures in the books and feeling the different types; rough, smooth,
and rippled.
For our Animals and Spring topics, we enjoyed lots of different sensory activities in the baby class. We enjoyed exploring with lentils, rice and coconut.
The children also enjoyed free painting with their hands and their feet. It was extremely messy, but a great sensory activity. They played with their animals in water and soap
and gave their animal friends a bath.
The weather we had was great with the snow, but as the babies are very small, we brought the snow into them on trays. We put it onto the mats and let them feel the
texture and how cold it was. They really enjoyed this.
They made lovely St Valentine’s Day cards for their parents. The children sat with their Educarers and used the musical instruments on the floor. We played with the piano, xylophone, and music shakers. They used paint in water to make different colours, and coloured coconut for sensory play.
Stories from our Wonderful Wobbler Room
Our wobblers enjoyed learning topics around the subject of the Home, food and cutlery. The children loved to do art activities based around our home and painted houses, learning our colours at the same time. For our role play, we played House in our Home Corner.
They also had lots of water play activities, and enjoyed playdough, cornflower messy play and rice.
Our wobblers loved baking too and took turns stirring and mixing. They also explored colours, using different colours and mixing them together to see what colours they could make.
We love sports, and we created a football pitch using a box and painted it with the markings of a football pitch. We played lots of outdoor games; football, throwing catching and dribbling to improve our balance. We thought the children about turn taking and sharing as they needed to throw the ball or kick it to each other.
Conversations with the children about different types of sports, such as Tennis, football basketball, baseball and rugby, was a nice way for them to learn about different types of sports.
We coloured in pictures of items needed for these types of sport and matched them. For instance, they matched a tennis racket with a tennis ball, and football with a goal net.
When Snow Day arrived, our children enjoyed running around in the snow out in the garden and seeing the marks they left on the ground with their feet and hands. We also
gathered some snow as it was very cold and brought it indoors for them to continuing messy play.
As we spoke about Spring too, the children made spring arts and crafts, coloured in different flowers and spoke about the caterpillars that will turn into butterflies.
Sensory play with Animals was a big favourite in our Wobbler Room this month. They created a farm to play with the animals and loved making animal footprints with the toy animals from paint and paper.
They also loved using flash cards to learn about animals and we sang the Old Mac Donald song a lot and our Educarers taught the children what noises the animals make.
Tails From Our Toddler Room
For our Colours and Painting theme, our toddlers made lots of different arts and crafts, rainbows, happy faces, flowers and animals. They did lots of messy play with playdough
and gloop too. Each day the messy play was a different colour, so they could learn about colours too at the same time.
The children also did experiments and activities in which they mixed colours to see what happens. They enjoyed messy play painting where they used their hands and choose their own colours to make their pictures.
As the weather is getting nicer, we spent lots of time outdoors and we are looking at the planes flying above us outside. Another favourite topic of learning from our Toddlers is transport.
We made a train together in class and the children coloured in each part. We then combined it together an stuck it up on the wall. We played a train game in the classroom using
the chairs, and we lined them up and the children hoped on board and gave their tickets to the train driver.
Music is a big hit in this class too and the children loved dancing and jumping around.
We practiced our fine motor skills and introduced food into the mix of learning also. The children painted pictures of different types of food and used their forks to practice picking them up. They enjoyed tasting lemons with their pancakes. To help the children improve their fine motor skills we are using our practical life equipment, teaching them how to hold a pencil, how to use pin boards and practice on their pouring skills.
Preschool Room News
The children discussed the different types of food. We asked questions like, what is good for us and what is bad? We made different food group boxes using paint cut outs and a
food pyramid. The children all had a discussion of the types of food they dislike or LOVE!
As the weather was cold and lots of snow arrived, the children enjoyed spending a lot of time in the garden. They went out and made snow angels on the ground and built little snowmen. We them brought the snow indoors and also decided to explore ice play, where we mixed different coloured paints into ice and let them melt. While melting they grabbed their paint brushes and painted paper with the melted ice. One child during this play commented “Wow, a new colour”!
The children are also very interested in construction play and building giant houses and monster trucks. We went on a scavenger hunt for insects around the garden and did some snail and Dragon Fly arts and crafts. We made a gorgeous Spring table in the classroom, with leaves and flowers that we found outdoors.
Balance activities was a big hit and the children thought this activity was funny as they tried to compete with each other on who could stand the longest on one foot!
They enjoyed sand play and making different shapes with the sand and lots of messy play.
Our Love Heart Monster that we created for St Valentine’s Day was made with such love by our preschool children. We painted love hearts and made hot air balloon, and roses with lollipop stick and crepe paper. The children enjoyed making St Valentine’s Day cards for their parents and siblings.
We got introduced to Rufus the Hand Washing Monster, which we loved, and for Chinese New Year, we made Dragons and lanterns.
Afterschool Adventures
Our afterschool enjoyed some planting and making Chinese New Year arts and crafts.
For Balance Day, we had lots of activities focusing on balance, including obstacle courses, walking on planks, balancing on one foot competitions.
For St Valentine’s Day, we made cards and different paper flowers for family.
Carnival Day was a day full of dance and singing. We made different carnival masks, accessories and making puppets too.
We love Lego, and we loved making different types of objects such as boats, cars, houses and Lego figures.
